From cine-file.info

Ben Kolak’s SCHIZCAGO (New American)
The Building Stage (412 N. Carpenter St.) — Friday and Saturday, 10pm
Chicago filmmaker Ben Kolak’s directorial debut is so crazy it just might work. Appropriately enough, it has three working titles, even on the eve of its Chicago premier: SCHIZOCOOL, SCHIZCAGO and AMERICAN QUALITY AND FREEDOM. The film follows a pack of cute, indolent twenty-somethings through a summer in the city as they hustle drugs and money from medical researchers, Craigslist perverts, corporate suits, and the military. They more-than-comfortably survive as parasites of the behemoths of late capitalism. Their jaded slang is made of buzzwords, catch-phrases and technical jargon, gesturing at big ideas they don’t have the will or the need to grasp. And yet Kolak and Rachel Wolther’s script is deathly funny; sharp-witted, slapstick, or absurdist, whatever the moment requires. Alex Inglizian’s sound design is also slyly hilarious, adding an under-layer of disorientation and parody to improbable scenarios. We see a lot of microphones poking out of garments or into the frame, and sometimes the acting is awkward in the ‘Ma, I’m on the TeeVee!’ kind of way. And yet the look of the film is authentic, this human artifice backdropped by the muraled overpasses, grated bridges and chemical sunrises that feel like home to anyone who’s ever ridden down Archer avenue at the end of a long, weird night. SCHIZCAGO maintains a steady awareness of Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL, but there’s a big, important difference; in the four decades that have passed, righteous anger has withered into consumer effrontery. SCHIZCAGO is the philosophical mayhem that follows from asking a generation that has everything ‘what more could you wish for?’ (2011, 89 min, HD Video) JF